As a native speaker of one of the above, I'm sometimes confused when people online use "he" for a generic duck or cat or other animals that are female in my native language

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 5 points 2 days ago

I believe in English you would use it if you don't know an animal's gender. But it's not my first language either so

[–] einkorn@feddit.org 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This is not true anymore as we have all moved to de-gender our language according to the teachings of the late Hermes Phettberg by which gender-specific endings are replaced by the letter Y.

So, i.e. the German word for a person operating a bakery is now "Bäcky" instead of "Bäcker" (m) and "Bäckerin" (f).

I'm totally serious about this

not 🤪

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 days ago

Damn I had no idea who this guy was. What a legend.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

You know, that's really close to the original way gendering was done in German.

There used to be separate word endings for male and female, and if you don't care you'd just skip the ending. IIRC it was "Bäcko" for male, "Bäcka" for female and "Bäck" for "I don't care as long as I get good bread".

The vovel shift then changed -o and -a both to -e, and then there was no gender marking at all. The modern -in ending for female forms only originated in the 16th century to make women more visible in the language.

That's why German doesn't have symmetric male/female variants but only a generic and a female form. As in, if you say "Bäckerin" it's clear you are specifically only referring to women, while "Bäcker" doesn't clearly mean you are only referring to a man.

[–] thatonecoder@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

The difference between those and English is that they use grammatical gender, but English takes it literally

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah not relevant to english tho as there actually is a solution for the problem unlike other languages

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, you use whichever you want and just worry about it less.

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

German works. We have more than enough options for non-genered language.